1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for storing data in a data store.
2. Description of the Related Art
Current standards are being developed to provide a framework for storing digital video content. One such framework proposed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) is the Media Exchange Format (MXF) that provides an architecture for exchanging digital video content as a file. An MXF file has a file header that includes metadata providing information on the video content, also referred to as the “essence”, that follows the file header. A footer terminates the file. The MXF metadata is comprised of a plurality of objects that are encoded using the Key, Length, Value (KLV) coding scheme. Each KLV object includes a key which is a label that identifies the content of the value, a length field indicating the length of the value of the key, and the value itself. For instance, if the key indicates an actor's name, then the length would be the number of characters, including blank spaces, in the actors name, and the value is the actor's name. The KLV metadata objects provide information on the essence in the file through a set of attributes that describe the content in terms of author, quality, production time, developer, participants (e.g., actors, director, etc.), format, etc. The metadata in the file header thus provides a technique for identifying the video content (essence) without the need to render the actual essence. The SMPTE provides a KLV Metadata Dictionary having numerous unique 16 byte universal labels. For instance, universal labels are provided for the unique material identifier (UMID) of the essence, title, content producer, episode number, actors, production members, etc.
In addition to the MXF interchange format, the Motion Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) within the International Standards Organization (ISO), is developing a standard called MPEG-7. The MPEG-7 defines a standard for providing metadata on video content that utilizes the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and an XML schema. The XML language uses tags to define, transmit, validate and interpret data. MPEG-7 provides a Description Definition Language (DDL) to allow the creation of description schemes to provide information on video content (essence). Each piece or type of information, referred to as an element, is defined as having a particular structure. The data provided for that particular element is included within the element tags. Thus, there could be a title tag, director tag, lead actor tags, etc. Each element has one or more attributes of that element. For instance, the directory element may have a name attribute providing the name of the directory.
One challenge for data warehousing systems for video content is to design a framework to allow the storage and cataloging of video content that conforms to the MXF, MPEG-7 or any other standard file interchange format, and to utilize the metadata maintained in such MXF and MPEG-7 files to allow for searching and cataloging of the video content in the data warehouse.